As a young Royal Air Force officer, Arthur C. Clarke helped develop a radar landing system as part of a team with Louis Alvarez, who then aided the Manhattan project, later helped determine when the three shots were fired at president Kennedy, and then proposed that a meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs. Shortly after …

The Human Instinct, by Kenneth Miller (Simon and Schuster, 2017, ISBN 978-1476790268). 304 pp. Hardcover, $26.00. Although Kenneth Miller, a pro-evolution cell and molecular biologist, is within the modern liberal, science-friendly wing of Roman Catholics, in the end he is a creationist in the sense that he believes there really is a supernatural creator deity. …

These days, many who are secular and/or on the center-left just don’t get why so many on the evangelical Right seem so darn dead-set on denying the threat of global climate change, to the point that they thrill in chanting “Drill, baby, drill!” Many may imagine that if duly educated about the science of CO2-driven …

Secularization continues to make big gains. Those Americans who rank themselves as nonreligious and those who qualify as atheists (broadly defined as those who are not theists) each ballooned by a tenth of the total population in just ten years.

American mainstream media have long criticized discrimination against Jews, African Americans, and Hispanics, yet they’ve been doing an excellent job of playing down, if not outright ignoring, chronic bigotry against atheists. The rarity of atheist-friendly op-eds on major papers’ opinion pages has been a reflection of this bias. Having conducted groundbreaking research on the links …

Advanced sociological research has determined that dysfunctional socioeconomic factors are responsible for the origin and historical popularity of religious faith and that sci ence, secure prosperity, and consumerism are radically undermining faith all across the first world. Contrary to naysayers, the so-called secularization hypothesis (which predicts that social and scientific advances will drive a gradual …